The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Service providers, or individuals that provider specific types of services, can be extremely useful for certain situations but extremely difficult to locate. For example, a person who may be willing to act as a babysitter for neighbors may be extremely useful for a neighborhood, but extremely difficult to locate through conventional means. If a parent or other party needs a babysitter but has not used one in a particular city before, or is seeking a new one for other reasons, the typical means of locating one have included open communications to friends or relatives seeking a referral. This is time-consuming and inefficient.
For many types of services, business rating websites allow a user to search for businesses of particular types and to look up reviews of the businesses. While useful for locating established business entities, business rating websites are not useful for finding service providers who provide the service part time, such as a babysitter. Where a pizza parlor is likely to have an entity account with a business rating website that includes reviews of the pizza parlor, a menu, and hours of operation, a college student who is willing to babysit on nights and weekends to earn some extra money likely would not have that information available on a business rating website.
Additionally, business rating websites may be inefficient for finding service providers who are available for specific time periods. The pizza parlor in the above example likely has hours of operation that do not change. In contrast, the college student in the above example may have plans on Tuesday and Saturday night one week, no plans the next week, and be unavailable for the entirety of the following week while studying for finals. Even if the business rating websites listed service providers such as part time babysitters, a user of the system would have to individually contact each service provider to determine whether the service provider is available when needed. It is also unlikely that a service provider who is willing to perform part time service for neighbors would be willing to maintain and continually update a current schedule so that the provider's neighbors could see the provider's availability from day to day.
Other methods of finding service providers include requesting recommendations through a social networking account. For example, a user may post on a social networking account that he is searching for a babysitter for Tuesday and is searching for recommendations. A few people may respond with recommendations for babysitters they have used in the past, but the requester would still need to contact each babysitter individually. Additionally, if a person who was willing to babysit saw the post with the recommendations, the babysitter may feel discouraged from responding to the request for recommendations with an offer to babysit. Even if a service provider was willing to respond to requests for recommendations posted on a social network, the service provider would need to be constantly checking the social networking website to find these posts. Where the service provider is a part time babysitter, it is unlikely that the service provider would be willing to expend that large amount of effort into finding clients.
Another issue with modern approaches to finding service providers is that some services entail a level of trust between the service provider and the service requester. For example, a babysitter is generally left alone in a requester's house with that requester's children. The requester is unlikely to hire a babysitter that the requester does not know or trust for such a job. Even if the service requester identifies a babysitter, the requester needs a reason to trust the babysitter to be left alone in the requester's house with the requester's children.
Therefore, there is a need for a system or method for facilitating the locating and hiring of trustworthy service providers. Specifically, there is a need for a computer-implemented method that increases the efficiency with which a user can find service providers that are available to accept a service request at a specific time without putting a burden on the service providers that the service providers are unable or unwilling to handle.
A technological problem exists in finding and hiring service providers. Current electronic means for finding businesses are inadequate for finding many types of service providers. The problems identified by the inventors in this disclosure have been identified in the context of developing social networking services that use digital electronic mobile computing devices to communicate over data networks to server computers that provide other kinds of social networking services. An electronic system that maintains customers by providing efficient access to service providers and maintains service providers by decreasing the difficulties in managing an online account for the service provider is needed to solve this technology based problem.